Darwen Arkwright

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. This week's book is:

Hartley, A.J. Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact. New York: Razorbill - Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/11243909]

Booktalk:

     Darwen stood up and turned. Behind him the forest continued, but -- suspended in midair, exactly at the height he had hung it on the back of the door -- was the empty mirror frame, and through it he could see the shelves and coat hangers in his bedroom closet. For a moment, all the strangeness fell away and a single word came to mind.
     "Cool," he said into the night.

p.45-46*

When Darwen gets to Atlanta he's far from home with no friends, a business-minded aunt, and the specter of a stuffy prestigious private school looming over his head. A magical world only he can see on the other side of his closet mirror is just what he needs. Until things start going wrong there too. Darwen just has to save that other world, even it it means he also has to make some friends in Atlanta he can trust with his secret.

Review:
Darwen immediately falls in love with the world through his mirror (as did I). It's lush and quiet and exciting, and he almost immediately makes a new friend. In short, it's nothing like Atlanta, where the weather's hot but the tea is only lukewarm, which is nothing like the small town near Manchester that Darwen used to call home. As things start to go badly in Silbrica (mirror world) and Darwen and his new friends become more involved in finding a solution, the more we find out about Darwen's past and how he ended up in Georgia. He is so very sad and doesn't want to let anyone in. I thought that his issues were just going to be left unresolved once the action in Silbrica got going, but I was happily surprised to see that Silbrica and the "real world" were much more connected than I could have imagined in that and other respects.

Darwen briefly mentions that he has one Black parent and one white, something that, in the past, made him feel like he never belonged in either group. This is not, however, an issue for him at his new school in Atlanta (his newness and lack of familiarity with American football provide more than enough fodder for the bullies). In this prestigious school for which tuition must be paid in advance, class is a much bigger divider than race. In this respect, Darwen should be good -- his aunt is a successful businesswoman, after all -- but his blue-collar Manchester accent (as opposed to a posh one from London) gets in his way. On the other hand, Darwen's friend Alexandra is avoided by everyone because she is just so annoying (so so annoying), and yet approved of by Darwen's aunt (who also finds her exhausting) because of Alexandra's mother's success and refinement. His friend Rich, who is super smart, kind, and polite, is looked down upon by classmates and Darwen's aunt alike because of his family's "white trash" farming background. All three of them feel their outsider status acutely, which is part of why they end up becoming friends even though they have little in common.

All of these real life concerns pale, both in Darwen's mind and in the reading, in comparison to Mr. Peregrine and his mirror shop of gateways to Silbrica. Though the beauty and the magic of the place does not last long for Darwen, he sees enough of it to know that the world on the other side of the mirror is special, that it is a place worth saving, and that he is a part of it. The more horrible the situation gets there and the more horrible the creatures Darwen et. al. encounter, the stronger his determination to save it (and the stronger the intensity of the story) becomes.

This is a really fun, adventurous read. Though it is a bit darker, I think it fits well with other secret-world-in-the-wardrobe-type books, and it will be a good book for readers ready to graduate from those books but not yet ready for the content in older YA fantasies.

I'll leave you with one last quote to seal the deal:

     "... Well, this is excellent."
     "Excellent?" Darwen repeated. "I almost got killed!"
     "Almost is such a wonderful word, don't you think?" said the shopkeeper with a wink. "So full of wiggle room and loopholes, so not-absolutely-anything. Almost killed means still very much alive, which, I'm sure you will agree, makes all the difference. So, the only remaining question is, when are you going back?"

p.145-6*

Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact comes out next week!


Book source: ARC provided by the publisher through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.


*Quotes and page numbers are from an uncorrected proof and may not match the published copy.

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

Chime

Billingsley, Franny. Chime. New York: Dial Books - Penguin Books (USA) Inc., 2011. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/10284513]

Booktalk:

I've confessed to everything and I'd like to be hanged.

Now, if you please.

p.1

Briony's life consists of two main pursuits. She's spent her whole life trying to hide the fact that she's a witch. Better to keep her neck out of the noose. And since her stepmother died -- correction, since Briony killed her stepmother -- she's been taking care of her twin sister Rose. But lately Briony's been a bit conflicted. When Rose gets the swamp cough, a disease that is slowly killing off the town's children, Briony has a choice: she can let Rose die or she can deliver a message on behalf of the creatures of the swamp in return for Rose's health, revealing her witchy self in the process.

It's not as though she really has a choice.

Review:
Chime is an interesting twist on the current paranormal fare. It's set in an unspecified past when England is in a kind of transitional phase. The Old Ones are still around, but they're being pushed back into disappearing wild places, such as the swamp that is being drained behind Briony's home. Her little town with its busy pub across from the gallows and Briony, the beautiful daughter of the town preacher who's being pursued by a handsome but dumb local guy, were comfortably recognizable. The addition of Eldric, the handsome AND charming son of a family friend, made me think I knew what I was in for. In a good way.

But I was wrong. I had no idea what a treat I was in for when I met Briony. She's smart and sarcastic and employs just the right kind of self-depreciating-but-everyone-else-is-annoying-too humor. For example:

Cecil teased me to reveal my worldly knowledge, and I found amusing ways to sidestep his questions, and on we went with this for quite a while until it occurred to me that this is what is called flirting.
It's a tedious exercise.

p.177

Underneath her slick veneer, Briony has some real self-hate. She is both a witch and a preacher's kid, after all. Her self-loathing competes pretty heavily with her self-preservation instinct as Briony tries to figure out how to appease the Old Ones in her swamp to save Rose (who not only has done nothing wrong but whose problems Briony also places on her own shoulders) and save her own neck at the same time.

As if a great and fun yet complex main character/narrator weren't enough, there's Eldric who really is very charming and sweet and a worthy book crush. His interactions with Briony, especially their "fraternity," were really cute and fun, though their relationship was not without some very serious complications. Issues with Briony and Rose's father added real emotional depth to the story in ways that an emotionally and physically absent father is usually not able. And, of course, there's Rose. I prefer that you read about and fall in love with her for yourself. In short, Chime is just one good thing after another; I highly recommend it!


Book source: Philly Free Library


Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

Stiefvater, Maggie. Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie. Woodbury, Minn.: Flux - Llewellyn Publications, 2009. Print. A Gathering of Faerie 2.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/8109101]

This review contains no spoilers for Lament, and the book really doesn't either. And yet, this isn't quite a stand-alone book. There are a few things, especially in the stressful climax of the action, that will be a bit confusing if you don't at least have a vague idea of the first book.

Booktalk:

When people said "musician," they never seemed to mean "bagpiper." If I heard the phrase "folk musician" one more time, I was going to hit someone.

p.5

James and Dee, both fully recovered from their summer shenanigans (at least physically), have been recruited by a prestigious music school, miles away from the faeries they're hoping to leave behind. It should be a wonderfully enjoyable, life-changing experience, right? Except it's not. They're both still reeling from the love-proclamation-that-never-was, and neither of them plays the "right" kind of music for their prestigious school. And the faeries have followed them.

You'd think two people as experienced in the practical consequences of faerie lore as James and Dee would have known they'd be surrounded by faeries at a school named Thornking Ash.

Review:
I love James. In fact, I capital "L" Love him. He's funny and snarky and smart and oh-so-flawed. He's also hopelessly stuck in the friend-zone, and the story he tells from way over there is both hilarious and tragic. That's right. This book is all about James. Even the parts of the story that are told from other points of view are all about James. It's great. He deserves it.

Ballad contains some serious faerie shizz. There's a wack-job wielding an iron crowbar, mysterious singing accompanied by a guy with horns growing out of his head (possibly king of something ;) ), teachers who wear iron jewelry, and the return of Eleanor, Lament's faerie queen, but what this book is really about is how James finally figures out that girls like him. At the opening of this book, his heart is continuing to break over Dee. Still, he finally allows himself to revel in the attention of another woman (and though it gets steamy in a few places, it's totally an intellectual romance). He also finally gets to have some guy friends, even if his closest buds consist of Paul, his oboe playing roommate, and Sullivan, his English teacher/dorm parent. Even at Thornking Ash and without Dee (who contributes with text messages never sent between chapters), James figures out how to be happy.

And this is a Stiefvater book. As you can see, this woman knows how to put words on a page. Her characters are all fully-fleshed people, many of whom I would die to eat Chinese take-out with on a Saturday night. They're funny and smart and a little nerdy. This would be a great book for John Green fans who want to ease into fantasy, or vice-versa.

So far, there's no word of another book in this series, but I still want to throw this out there: Stiefvater, if you're listening, the world could use more James.


Book source: Philly Free Library
Book 1: Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

Under the Green Hill - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. This week's book is:

Sullivan, Laura. Under the Green Hill. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/10043234]

Booktalk:

     "It's like in The Lion, the Witch and the Whachamacallit," Silly said, opening the door.
     "Wardrobe," Meg said.
     "Yup, that's it. Look, it's full of furs, too, just like the one in the book. I wonder if there's a passageway to a secret world."
     "We have enough to do here with the fairies without finding another world full of trouble," Meg said testily.

p.123

When a dangerous fever breaks out in the States, the Morgan children: Rowan, Meg, Silly, and James, are sent to England to stay with relatives for the summer. And haughty Finn and allergy-stricken Dickie are going with them. As they head to the Rookery, their great-aunt and -uncle's house, the Morgan children expect to spend a long summer in the company of tiresome elderly people. Finn's more concerned about the lack of electricity and Dickie's worried about all the pollen in those famous English gardens. Needless to say, none of them are excited. But when they get to the Rookery, they find a house of busy people getting ready for a midnight festival and themselves packed off to bed, forbidden to leave the grounds. Nothing is more exiting than that which is forbidden, so the Morgans, Finn, and Dickie sneak out to join the festivities, and what they find will change the course of the summer and possibly their lives.

Review:
As you may have guessed from this blog's title and header, I'm a bit partial to kids in unfamiliar old houses who stumble upon magical worlds. Extra points if that old house is in the English countryside. Extra, extra points if the kids get caught up in an epic war requiring brave heroics. There was never any doubt in my mind that I would love Under the Green Hill.

I want to be so very grown-up and objective and say that what I found so attractive in this book was its own sense of place in and reverence to the tradition of books about kids in unfamiliar old houses, so on and so forth. Or that I loved the allusions to other fairy/faerie stories that I caught but will probably fly over the heads of young readers. Or that I was excited about a middle grade book featuring a position of power passed down through the maternal line, with almost inconsequential (but loved!) husbands marrying into the family to help produce the all important female heir and spare. Or even that I was enchanted by Sullivan's use of language. For example:

Dickie could tell it was extraordinary just from the smell. An odor of knowledge permeated the air, ghosts of arcane secrets wafted about by the breeze the children made when they opened the door. Here were books more rare than any first editions. ... The air seemed stale, as though no one had visited that room in decades. But, oddly, though there was dust on all visible surfaces, the library didn't make Dickie sneeze. Books have their own peculiar kind of dustiness, which didn't catch in his nose the same way cat's hair or thistle pollen might.

p.119

I could say all of that, and it would all be true (especially that last one). But what really made me fall in love with Under the Green Hill was the story, pure and simple. I'm a sucker for a good fantasy adventure, and this one is full of that goodness: a beautiful setting that is recognizable but still full of fantastical elements, betrayal, swamp monsters, life and death stakes, war-training, a wise benefactress who one can only hope will make everything okay, an enemy that isn't so evil that anyone really wants to kill him, a sensible sister who tries to be the voice of reason, and a brother hell-bent on grand acts of heroism. Plus an added bonus (that I'm also a sucker for): a selkie!

So Finn, Dickie, and even youngest brother James are a bit underdeveloped. That's okay; they each serve their purpose in the story, hindering or helping the rest of the Morgans along. There's also a little ambiguity in the beginning about when this story is set. It feels like it should be set in the past, between World Wars perhaps, what with the incurable fever ravaging America's children and names like Finn, Rowan and Dickie, but Finn despairs about the DVDs and video games he brought with him to England but can't use since the Rookery has no electricity. It's also possible that I projected a former time on a book whose time period should be last week. Regardless, time period ceased to matter once all the children reached the Rookery and the real story started.

In case you missed it the first two times I said it, I loved this book and I think you all should read it! More professionally, I think other fantasy adventure readers are sure to enjoy it, and it will be an immediate hit with readers looking for something to read once they've run out of Narnia books.


Under the Green Hill is available now, and its sequel Guardian of the Green Hill will be available this fall!


Book source: Review copy provided by the publisher.


Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

Guardian of the Dead

Healey, Karen. Guardian of the Dead. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/8574661]

Awards:
ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults (2011)
William C. Morris YA Debut Finalist (2011)

Booktalk:
Ellie can't seem to get control of her life lately. She's let her best friend Kevin "convince" her to drink on school nights and even to let him sleep in her room. She's made a fool of herself in front of the guy of her dreams, Mark (did she somehow mistake her secret fantasy that he actually wanted to interact with her for real life?). She's even starting to get along with Iris, Kevin's other best friend. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, she has a nagging feeling that the Eyelasher killings that have been terrorizing the North Island have something to do with her. This feeling goes way beyond the connection that everyone who's lived on the North Island feels to the murders, and that feeling might have something to do with Mark. Unless that's just her fantasy life invading reality again.

Review:
There is a lot to love about Guardian of the Dead. Here's the shortlist:

• a smart, kind of nerdy heroine
• the freedom/restrictions of boarding school
• use and explanation of Maori myth (by a white author who has the balls to point out in the text the colonial nature, possible inaccuracies, and just plain wrongness of Maori myth written down by white people)
• high school use of a university library, because serious shizz calls for serious research
• patupaiarehe (fairy-type creatures), one of whom is Titiana in Iris's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream -- because I'm not the only one who likes art to imitate life
• casual treatment of varying sexualities*
• a hottie who is half-Maori, half-...well, something else

and I could go on. But do you want to know what I loved the absolute most about this book? The ending. I won't go into detail (or talk about the "action" ending) because I don't want to ruin it for you (cause oh-my-gosh is it cool), but I can still tell you why I love this ending.

Things go crazy, Ellie falls in lurv which may become love in the future, and Ellie and love-interest have to save the world. It's life-changing, obviously, but Ellie doesn't let it derail her life completely. She doesn't possibly blow off her art school application or get married right out of high school or ditch her best friend in the face of tru lurv and harsh circumstances or even, and this is the big one, drop out of school in order to save the world which apparently cuts off the possibility of being a brilliant academic and instead becomes a mostly silent side-character.**

Instead, Ellie keeps going, gets excited about going to college and majoring in Classics, and tells love-interest that she'll visit him when she's on break. She simply takes all that she's learned from these life-changing events with her, because that's what smart girls do.

So, if you want to read an urban fantasy (a little light on the urban grit) or paranormal romance (a little light on the romance) that's headed by a smart girl, this is your book. It's also your book if you want to read the Maori Percy Jackson equivalent, a good boarding school romp, a murder mystery, a different kind of fairy book...


Book source: Philly Free Library


*How often do you see YA books with a teen character who is asexual? Not often. I'm not going to lie and say it's not a big deal at any point, but it is not THE big deal. And it is not a problem ever, except to the people crushing on the character. :)

**Was this anyone else's take-away message from Hermione's whole 1 or 2 lines in that horrible epilogue?!? I know Ginnie's important and everything, especially cause she's the mother of Harry's children, but why does she get all the speaking parts? Since when does Hermione let everyone around her do all the talking?

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

Hereville - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. This week's book is:

Deutsch, Barry. Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. New York: Amulet Books, 2010. Print.

[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/8463290]

Awards:

Sydney Taylor Book Award for Older Readers (2011)

Booktalk:
Mirka is what some may call a willful child. She skips classes, doesn't care about her reputation, and is quickly learning her step-mother's art of turning any argument in her favor, regardless of logic. She also wants to be a dragon-slaying hero. With a new witch living in the woods surrounding Hereville, it looks like her dreams may come true.

Review:
I'm not a big graphic novel reader; I can usually live with or without them. When you spend a whole book just reading the text and having to remind yourself to pay attention to the pictures, it takes some of the fun out of the experience. That was not the case here. Deutsch's illustrations and text compliment each other beautifully, speeding things up in suspenseful moments and slowing things down when Mirka is doing the same. Part of this may be due to the subdued colors (most of the book is in shades of tan, with nighttime scenes in blues and purples) which allow the text and images to blend well together. But I think the real reason I was able to get into this in a way that rarely happens for me with graphic novels is that it's based on a comic, and you can tell. Deutsch makes the text part of the picture (check out page 8 in this preview of the book). It's not all POWs like in a superhero comic, but it's all still integrated, making it very easy to read.

Mirka lives with her father, step-mother, brother and 7(!) sisters in Hereville, an insular Orthodox Jewish community. Throughout the book there are some things about Orthodox life that are explained to the reader, such as the importance of the Shabbos and the differences between rebel, pious, and popular Orthodox girls. Yiddish words used in the text are also defined in footnotes on each applicable page. Still, for the most part, Deutsch forgoes the explanations of or about the Orthodox faith or lifestyle and instead shows them in action through Mirka. For example, she never hits the older boys who are bullying her brother with her hands, but with sticks and rocks (it's warranted and not violent). Later one warns her that the rules forbidding unmarried people of the opposite sex to touch each other will not save her from retribution (p68).

But rather than being a book all about an Orthodox Jewish girl, Hereville is primarily a book about a young girl who wants to slay dragons and meets a witch. Mirka's encounters with the witch (and her pig and the troll) are satisfyingly creepy without being too scary, and Mirka's over the top bravery and rash judgement fail her a couple of times. She has fights with her siblings, she sticks up for her little brother, she bonds with her step-mother. Mirka is just a normal girl with some adventurous dreams and aspirations.


Just for extra fun, here is my favorite page as shown in the original web comic. It perfectly showcases the art of the argument that Mirka is soaking up from her step-mother. :)


Book source: This was a wonderful Christmas present!

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

The Girl Who Could Fly for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. This week's book is:


Forester, Victoria. The Girl Who Could Fly. New York: Square Fish - Feiwel and Friends, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/4147503]

Booktalk:

"I'm a flier," she whispered and felt a strong sense of relief and pride. It felt so natural to be in a sky full of clouds and have birds flying past. Like a homecoming. She also noticed that flying up high made all of the things she left behind on the ground seem not as important. They were so small, after all, and the sky was so big.

p. 24

But things on the ground have a way of catching up with Piper McCloud. Eventually her special talents land Piper a spot in the prestigious, yet unheard of, I.N.S.A.N.E.. And even though Piper is exceptional and anything but normal, she goes to the Institute of Normalcy, Stability, And NonExceptionality in the hope that she'll finally have a place where she can be a flier and still fit in.

Review:
If you can't tell from the above quote, The Girl Who Could Fly is a beautifully written book about an introspective girl. Except that this introspective girl also has a bit of a temper, an inability to lie convincingly, and the bad habit of sticking up for what is right even when it has the potential to ruin her. I loved reading this book. Piper's adventures at I.N.S.A.N.E. were both the normal kinds of things a young girl who has never been allowed to attend school might have (if you've never seen a bully, how do you react to a mega-bully in a mixed-age classroom?) and the kinds of things that you'd expect to happen at a school for kids with superhero abilities.

Before things go south at I.N.S.A.N.E., Piper is the poster child for doing what she's told and standing up to bullies, or kids who like to electrocute littler kids, just as an example. Having grown up on a farm with only her parents for company, Piper is in many ways older than her 10 years. This might be a problem for some readers, especially when Piper waxes poetic about how they should all have goals in life and take the hard road as long as it's the right one. But Piper is just so genuine that I couldn't manage to be bothered by it. Her conviction (some might call it stubbornness at times) comes through the page, and it's easy to see how the other kids can go along with her, even when they think she's a little odd.

Unlike similar books, TGWCF has some more fantasy to it. Each of the kids at I.N.S.A.N.E. has some kind of special ability, each of which is important to the story and important to their plans. Other than their abilities (and little bits of backstory), many of the other kids are pretty one-dimensional. Still, Piper manages to make friends, and those friends are fully realized characters. This book definitely has a lot of precocious kid elements to it, especially when the kids all start working together. I think it will be a good fit for fans of the Lemony Snicket books or The Kneebone Boy.


Book source: I bought it.


Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

The Lost Hero - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Riordan, Rick. The Lost Hero. New York: Disney - Hyperion Books for Children, 2010. Print. The Heroes of Olympus 1.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9822197]

Booktalk:
Camp Half-Blood is packed, even in the winter. With the addition of new cabins for all the minor gods' children and everyone being claimed by the time they're 13, there are a ton more Heroes roaming around. But things still aren't going swimmingly. Zeus has closed Olympus and is not allowing the gods to talk to their mortal children. Artemis, even, is cut off from her huntresses. And Percy's missing. No matter where Rachel's predictions send Annabeth looking, she can't find him.

But this story isn't about all that, not really. It's about Piper, Leo and Jason. Three half-bloods with special gifts: Piper can convince anyone to do just about anything, Leo is amazingly good with his hands and can make an engine out of just about anything, and Jason, well, at the moment Jason can't remember anything. They've been hidden away at a school for delinquents, all unclaimed even though they're well beyond 13, but chosen by the gods since birth for what they must do now.

Review:
The Lost Hero totally fulfilled all my wishes and desires for it. It's still Camp Half-Blood (even if Chiron is especially cranky and unhelpful in this go-round), but it's not just more of the same. We're not so far into the future that Percy and Annabeth are former legends, nor are we so close to the end of the last Percy book that we have to sit around and watch them make out all the time. They're not even main characters in this story, just cameo characters. The addition of the children of all the minor gods makes everything a bit more hectic and crowded and crazy, but the explanations of the various gods and their traits are still there. Not only do we get Piper, Leo and Jason as new characters, but there are a bunch of new potentially important folks back at camp as well. And (this is a bit spoilery, so highlight to read) San Francisco was never really evil! But that last one is probably only important to me.

I couldn't have asked for more, and I doubt other fans of the Percy Jackson books could either.

The Lost Hero is told from the perspectives of Piper, Leo and Jason. While they all kind of sound alike (see my criticism of the alternative viewpoints in Riordan's The Red Pyramid), I never got them mixed up during the story. This may be more because of what is going on in each of their heads rather than distinction of voice. Even though they're all on the same quest and living through the same adventures/dangers, they're not remotely going through the same things. Each of their lives really has been leading up to this quest and they're just now starting to figure out how. Piper is going through all kinds of internal torment because she has been basically told that she'll double-cross the other two (not to mention that all her memories of Jason, who she thought was her boyfriend, are probably a product of some super-potent Mist). Leo is seeing his former babysitter Tia Callida (who encouraged playing with both fire and knives) and is figuring out connections between her, the weird circumstances surrounding his mother's death, and the prophecy he, Piper and Jason are meant to be fulfilling. And poor Jason. He's just trying to grasp hold of his memories: the ones that allow him to be a top-notch fighter, the ones that bring the gods' Roman rather than Greek names to his lips, and the ones that rumble in the back of his mind with every mention of the Titan War.

It's a bit more complicated, a bit more multi-layered, and a bit longer than the Percy books. But then, the characters (and the original Percy fans) are also a bit older. New readers will fare just fine without having read the Percy books (so far), but I have a feeling that won't be the case for much longer. And Percy fans will love the continuation of the Camp Half-Blood story.


Also of note: Leo is Latino and Piper is of Cherokee descent. Leo (very) occasionally uses Spanish words, especially in his memories. Piper reflects on her grandfather's life on the reservation as opposed to the life she's lived in California (her dad's a famous actor). She also bristles at the term "Half-Blood" upon reaching camp (though there is no examination or explanation of why that term bothers her in the text). Riordan doesn't make a big deal about the ethnicities of any of the characters (at least not the mortal half of their ethnicity...), but he still manages to make it matter.


Book source: Philly Free Library where I started out 27th in line for this title a week before its release. :)

Tombstone Tea

Dahme, Joanne. Tombstone Tea. Philadelphia: Running Press Teens - Running Press Book Publishers, 2009. Print.

[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/8431217]

Booktalk:
Jenny loves her daughter, Amy, and would do and has done anything and everything for her. This will never change. Even after they are separated by Amy's death. Even years after Jenny has died herself, hoping for a reunion beyond the grave. When Jessie walks into Laurel Hill Cemetery and bumps into the metal angel over Amy's tombstone, Jenny knows she can use Jessie's life force to bring Amy's spirit back to her. After all, a mother's love is eternal.

Review:
Tombstone Tea alternates (in huge chunks) between shortly after Amy's death and Jessie's modern day experiences in the cemetery. We don't quite learn what really happened between Jenny and her daughter at the same time that we watch Jenny try to use Jessie for her otherworldly purposes, but the two stories still run alongside each other with Paul as a connection and guide for each. His role as a spiritualist in the early 1900's is an interesting one that I wish had been looked at more closely. But even without any explanation of the spiritualist movement, it's clear from the start that Paul's connection to the dead is both important and powerful. Not until almost the end of the book do we see how much it altered his life.

For me, the characters, not the two storylines, were the strength of Tombstone Tea. Paul and the other ghosts Jessie meets in Laurel Hill Cemetery are well-done and manage to convey the weirdness of finding oneself a ghost as well as the history of their former, living selves without detracting from the story. It's very Graveyard Book, especially since all of them, save Jenny, are almost completely non-threatening. And Jenny? She is deliciously creepy, obsessive and dangerous, both in life and after it. She is not, however, enough to ratchet this book's scary points up to the "horror" level. Though there are scary moments, the whole thing is much more paranormal, creepy, spiritualist, if you will, than downright scary. It is still a great Halloween read, especially if you're fascinated by the Victorians' fascination with death and the beautiful cemeteries they created.


There was one thing this book was missing that I noticed right from the start: an author's note about the real Laurel Hill Cemetery. If I didn't live in so nearby in Philly and have a sister who really likes visiting cemeteries and a girlfriend who really likes taking pictures of weird things (Jessie's dad calls Laurel Hill a "magnificent outdoor sculpture garden" (16) and he is so right), I wouldn't know that this book is set in a real place. This is a real shame for a lot of different reasons, first of which is the fact that the main historical ghosts in the story were also real people that are actually buried in Laurel Hill (except Paul, of course, for whom there is no record in real life or the book). The spooky reason being that Laurel Hill hosts a lot of events throughout the year including one called Dining with the Dead, which is happening tonight. Eerily close to a Tombstone Tea, don't you think?


Book source: Philly Free Library

Nightshade City - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Wagner, Hilary. Nightshade City. New York: Holiday House, 2010. Print.

[Book cover credit: http://www.librarything.com/work/9209452]

Booktalk:

All eyes were upon the Nightshade brothers. The crowd's faced turned from joyful to bewildered; the rowdy noise turned to deafening silence, then shifted to a low drone of whispers.

The boys heard one rat say, "I saw them in the Combs. I swore they were ghosts!" Others said "Julius lives" or "Nightshade has returned!" The brothers were terrified and exhilarated. Who was their father?

p.53

Vincent and Victor Nightshade have spent most of their lives trying to blend in, just trying to survive. But once upon a time they had a family and a father who was loved by everyone in their community. When they're unexpectedly saved from a dreary and dangerous life in the Combs, they must carry the mantle of their father and save the rats still left in the Combs. Save them and bring them to Nightshade City.

Review:
I LOVED The Rats of NIMH, both book and movie, when I was a kid. When Nightshade City came for me in the mail, I was half really excited about reading a new novel about a secret civilization of intelligent rats and half really really worried that it could never live up to my memory of Mrs. Frisby and her children. Well, I was right on both counts. The secret civilization of intelligent rats is there and, in the same spirit of O'Brien's classic, they are very human little rodents and the descriptions and characterizations of them are simply magic. For example:

Lamenting his large dinner, Lithgo leaned against the wall for support as sweat trickled down his thick russet brow and steam wafted from his now-filthy coat. The two young lieutenants stood without a sound, waiting for the major's orders. All that could be heard in the dusky corridor was Lithgo's weighty breathing.

p.4

Can't you see that scene? You know what kind of major Lithgo is, the overweight, past his prime, spent kind. He's also really evil, but that's not the point of this paragraph. Wagner manages to describe the rats, especially when we first meet them, in a way that reminds you that they're rats but also reminds you that they're "people."

But this is not a novel about a sweet widow and her helpless children or even a society of rats who are fleeing humans. This is a novel about a just civilization of rats that was overthrown in a now legendary Bloody Coup. The bad guys are other rats, and they include a very large albino rat, escaped from some kind of testing facility, who delights in torturing and scaring those over whom he rules. This monster, Billycan, leads an army of orphaned male rats, teaching them to be killing machines and to police their former friends and neighbors before they even reach adulthood.

There are parts of this book that are definitely not for the faint of heart. Teenagers worry that their younger siblings are being tortured on their behalf; powerful leaders try to seduce young and beautiful girls; people (rats) die. Through all of that, Nightshade City and its early inhabitants never lose their resolve that things will turn out alright. Because of them, their normalcy and their senses of humor, the story never gets too scary or harsh. It's just important. What Vincent, Victor and the rest of the rats of Nightshade City are doing is of utmost importance and people will suffer greatly if they don't accomplish what they've set out to do. In this way, and in the way that violence and evil and other scary stuff is used, I think it is along the lines of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. What the characters are doing feels epic and like it will change everything. Maybe it will.

This definitely one of my favorite books read this year, which is something I almost never say. I just LOVED this!


Nightshade City was released earlier this month and is available for purchase!


Book source: Review copy provided by the publisher

A Different Day A Different Destiny - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Laing, Annette. A Different Day, A Different Destiny. Statesboro, Georgia: Confusion Press, 2010. Print. Snipesville Chronicles 2.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/10082476/]

Booktalk:
The Professor, doing what she does, manages to drop her modern calculator somewhere in the past. The changes this creates in the past causes changes that reach forward to our present day where it leaves a rift in time and drags Hannah, Brandon, and Alex back in time to right things. Again. Only this time they're all in 1851; Hannah in Scotland, Brandon in England, and Alex back in Snipesville where all their adventures started in the first place.

Review:
Laing has done it again! She's managed to cram a whole lot of information into an entertaining story (with a bit of actual danger thrown in this time) and created a dizzying web of characters connected to each other, the characters in Don't Know Where, Don't Know When, and Hannah, Brandon, and Alex's present day lives. Some of these connections are pretty obvious (the Gordons that Hannah lives with are the grandparents of the Scottish Mr. Gordon from the first book and a young girl in Balesworth who is the spitting image of Verity turns out to be her great-grandma), but that certainly didn't detract from their stories. And most of the connections I didn't see coming until the series of big reveals toward the end. I think that's the most amazing thing about these books for me: how some of the details all work out so seamlessly without being so obvious that I figured them out halfway through the book.

Hannah, Brandon, and Alex thought they had things bad in WWII England, but their experiences in the last book are nothing compared to what each of them goes through in 1851. Alone. In 1851, all three of them are considered adults, expected to earn a wage and take care of themselves. They each have to deal with this realization and figure out how to make their own ways and survive before they can even begin to think about how to find each other and get back home. The way that the book shifts between their stories was very clear and easy to follow. And for anyone (like me) for whom the year 1851 doesn't ring a bell, they are doing this all in the midst of preparations for Prince Albert's Great Exhibition and a growing disapproval across England and Scotland of the lingering institution of slavery in America.

Alex, still in Snipesville, comes face to face with slavery. As he travels to Savannah looking for work (with the help of a modern calculator he found in a cotton field to boost his mathematical skills), he is accompanied by a slave, Jupe, who is about his age. No matter how he tries to treat Jupe as an equal, Jupe never opens up to him or fully trusts him. Alex does manage to keep Jupe with him by lying about who legally owns him, keeping Jupe from being arrested, punished, or sold because he ran away. The situation with Jupe is complicated by the fact that Alex genuinely likes his employer, even though Mr. Thornhill buys and sells slaves in the course of his land sale transactions. This conflict eventually tears at Alex, and he remains upset and a bit broken at the close of the book. The question of how otherwise good people could participate in or even condone slavery is never answered here, which is probably as it should be.

Hannah and Brandon are free from the emotional and intellectual turmoil that Alex must endure in 1851. They're both left in horrible working and conditions by their trip back in time. Brandon "comes to" already in the pitch black dark of a coal mine (which seemed extraordinarily cruel to me) and eventually makes his way back to Balesworth. On the way he lives in a workhouse, becomes a professional mourner, and is, once again, a novelty to those around him. People assume that Brandon is a former slave, especially after he tells people that he was born in America. England, having recently abolished slavery in their own country, is on a crusade to have the same happen in America. Many people, especially the upper class women, want to know Brandon's thoughts on the subject and want to hear all about his experiences. The fact that he has to fabricate these experiences based on what he learned in history classes doesn't seem to bother anyone.

Hannah, of course, has the most tumultuous time. She's forced to be a piecer in a mill, first cotton and then jute, and earns pennies a week. She's fired twice and almost starves to death in between. She has a lot to complain about, but what Hannah is the most worried about is her lack of shopping opportunities. Her attitude is, once again, off-putting for most of the book, which is a shame as her storyline was the one I was the most interested in. At some point during her ordeal, it seems like Hannah may be learning something from the life she's living. She makes friends and finds herself in a family; she agitates for workers' rights (to hang out in the park) and gives an upper class woman who lives off mill profits the scare of her life by walking her through a tenement neighborhood. Still, as soon as she is rescued by the Professor and given a fancy dress and a bit of pocket money, all those hard-learned lessons fall right out of her head. She can't even be polite to a waiter, and why should she? It's his job to serve her. Ugh. I was really happy when the Professor ditched her again and she had to become a house maid.

Even with my disappointment in Hannah's character development, or lack thereof, I really enjoyed A Different Day, A Different Destiny. I also learned a lot about the working class in the British Empire during the Industrial Revolution and British involvement in the American Abolitionist Movement.


Book 1: Don't Know Where, Don't Know When
Book source: Review copy provided by the author. Thanks!

Extraordinary

Werlin, Nancy. Extraordinary. New York: Dial Books - PenguinGroup, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9701860]

Booktalk:
Seventh grade is a chance for Phoebe Rothschild to make a new start for herself. Yes, she's one of those Rothschilds. They're all wealthy, powerful, and leading almost charmed lives. There is nothing Phoebe can do to get away from her prestigious name, but she can make sure that her privilege doesn't make her a horrible person. As a huge step in this direction, Phoebe ditches her Mean Girl crowd in order to befriend new girl Mallory. Mallory, who shows up to school in a faerie costume. A see-through faerie costume. While not wearing underwear. Phoebe is going to help Mallory survive middle school and use the power that comes with her famous last name to provide aid for Mallory and her mentally unstable mother. Mallory is touched by Phoebe's kindness, but she's still hesitant. One should never develop feelings for one's mark. Especially since Mallory is not only trying to con Phoebe, she's trying to break her.

Review:
Yes, this is another faerie book. But instead of a human protagonist being plagues by faeries or sucked into their world, most of this book is story about two girls who are the best kind of best friends. They share everything, build each other up, and act like sisters from a fairytale rather than like siblings in real life. Phoebe is a Rothschild as in the actual real-life Rothschilds (the author's note explains the significance of the real Rothschilds and that Extraordinary is only based on a real family not real people). Phoebe is loaded and Mallory has almost nothing, but that never seems to come in the way of their friendship, even though Phoebe's mom is paying for Mallory's mom to have around the clock care. There is never that you-owe-me sentiment that can sometimes creep into those kinds of relationships. Everything is perfect. Except...

This story is broken up by numbered conversations with the Faerie Queen. It seems Phoebe is very important. She is needed desperately by an ailing Faerie Court and it is Mallory's job to prepare Phoebe for whatever it is that she must do. Though we see most of the story (everything but these Faerie Queen convos) from Phoebe's point of view, it is Mallory's conflicting loyalties that are the real meat of this story. She loves Phoebe in that intense way that teenage girls have, where your best friend is your whole world, but she knows that if she doesn't do what she's been sent into the human world to do, the Faerie Queen and her Court will fade away, along with Mallory and all of her people. Mallory struggles with this for years, putting off her choice between her family and her best friend. In the mean time, she hides her assignment and helps Phoebe come into her own, not as a Rothschild, but as Phoebe. But that's not what Mallory was sent to do. Seeing Mallory's struggle, the Faerie Queen sends in the one person who can break up Mallory and Phoebe's all encompassing girl world: a smokin' hot guy who just happens to be Mallory's older brother.

With the addition of Ryland, Phoebe has her own conflicting loyalties to contend with. She's drawn to him inexplicably, but she knows it would hurt Mallory SO MUCH to find out that she's in love with him. Let me take a moment to say that this never strayed into the paranormal romance trope of intense, surprising (only to the character), and irrational tru lurv at first sight. Ryland is an ass. He really is a horrible guy. But he's a faerie, and a pretty powerful one at that. He glamours Phoebe. So even though smart, funny, confident Phoebe knows that she shouldn't date a guy who treats her like a child, constantly tells her she could stand to lose a few pounds, and whose whims make him either enchanting or incredibly hurtful, she can't seem to stop seeking him out. When he's not there, she knows he's bad for her; when she sees him, no matter what comes out of his mouth and how much it wounds her, she's convinced that she can't survive without him. You can almost see the magic that Ryland is throwing at Phoebe drown out her rational self, a self that used to be supported by Mallory. Except that Mallory can't seem to forgive Phoebe for dating her brother. And no matter how cruel Ryland is to her, it is Mallory's abandonment that breaks Phoebe's heart.

In the end, this is a story about an amazing friendship that is so convincing and alive. Werlin's portrayal of both girls and their relationship is what makes this story great; the faeries are simply a fascinating and (amazingly) original plot device to show how far each girl is willing to go for the other. Phoebe and Mallory have the kind of friendship where you say I love you and mean it; the kind that you would sacrifice anything for. And in the end, one of them has to.



A note about the cover and internal illustrations:
Oh.My.Gosh. I hope they keep them. The cover of the ARC is a-maz-ing. It doesn't look like much in the above picture, but on the actual ARC it looks like it's over-dyed or super-saturated or something (why will my graphic designer sister not answer the phone when I need real words for things like this?). The colors are totally and unnaturally bright and deep. On amazon it looks like they've toned it down a bit, but I'm hoping that's just amazon doing some over zealous color correction or something. The unnatural beauty of the grass, the dress, the shoes(!), everything is so important to the story in ways that I cannot tell you for fear of spoiling. Just suffice it to say that if the grass on the published copy looks like something you could grow in your own yard, do yourself a favor and imagine that it's actually the color of really good astro-turf, but still alive! As for the internal illustrations, they're great too and really help to off-set the conversations with the Faerie Queen.


Book source: ARC provided by publisher through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program

The Thin Executioner

Shan, Darren. The Thin Executioner. New York: Little, Brown and Company - Hatchette Book Group, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9460780]

Booktalk:
Among the Um Aineh, being the son of the executioner is almost as good as being the son of the king. In a world of warriors where strength and honor are valued above all, even the youngest son of the executioner, Jebel Rum, can't get the respect he thinks he deserves with a tiny frame. He sets off on a quest to save his honor, a quest that will require him to travel the length of Makhras with a slave by his side, a slave he must sacrifice to Sabbah Eid. In return he'll be granted invincibility that will allow him to beat any man in competition or combat and gain the confidence and respect of his father and his people.

Review:
All of the publishers' blurbs and pre-pub info says that this book was inspired by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but I didn't get that from the story. Sure, It's a story about a young teen traveling with an adult slave who agrees to the trip in an effort to free his family. They get waylaid and sidetracked by a pair of con-artists who seem like friends but really want to sell them to the highest bidders. They travel along a river (but never on it!) and meet many new people with ideas like and unlike their own, and through their trials, the teen and the slave become friends. Okay, so maybe it's a LOT like Huck Finn, but the feel of the story is completely different. Huck Finn is light-hearted, easy-going fun on the surface with issues of race, slavery, violence, theft, general immorality boiling underneath.* In The Thin Executioner, the bad stuff is all right out in the open.

The society in which Jebel has been raised is exceedingly violent. The executioner is an exalted member of society in the way that movie stars are exalted in ours. They are not only men who mete out "justice," but also the providers of entertainment. Anyone convicted of any crime is executed; the Um Aineh have no jails and don't really hold much regard for human life. And their slaves aren't even considered human. Slaves live in their own section of the city where the living conditions are very degraded, can be beaten without recourse, and can be sentenced to death at the wish of their owner for any reason or none at all. Tel Hesani volunteers to accompany Jebel on his quest, knowing he will be executed at the end of it, to free his wife and children from this existence.

Once Jebel and Tel Hesani are on the road, Jebel depends on Tel Hesani's knowledge of the world and other people in it to survive, but still treats him with disdain. Because Jebel is eager to spend time with people like himself, meaning not slaves like Tel Hesani, they end up in quite a few compromising situations. The trials and tribulations of traveling through Makhras add up quickly, much more quickly than the change of heart I was expecting from Jebel. Tel Hesani saves him time and time again, and yet he's still valued as slightly more than a piece of shit by Jebel. About halfway through the book, I had to set it aside. Jebel's attitude is a lot to take. It isn't until Jebel and Tel Hesani are separated and Jebel gets to experience the life of a slave for himself that his ideas about slavery, human life, and Tel Hesani begin to change. When they're finally reunited, they continue on the quest, but Jebel (finally) seriously doubts whether he'll be able to kill Tel Hesani in the name of a god he's not sure is real in exchange for supernatural powers that may or may not exist.

The Thin Executioner is a long book, and I think that a lot of the obstacles Jebel and Tel Hesani meet on their way to Sabbah Eid could have been cut out without risking important plot points or character development. Still, it can be a gripping story. I had a hard time being in Jebel's head for so much of the book when he was such a self-centered jerk, but the payout is worth it in the end. If like me, you're suffering from post-Mockingjay pre-Monsters of Men malaise, The Thin Executioner just might soothe your gratuitous-violence-with-a-message seeking soul for a little while.


If LibraryThing is to be believed, Shan dedicated this book to the country of Jordan "which inspired much of this book's setting and plot, and whose landmarks provided the names of all the characters (with three exceptions) and places" (my ARC doesn't have the dedications page). Jebel also describes his crush as "slim and curvy, with long legs, even longer hair, dazzling brown eyes and teeth so white they might have been carved from shards of the moon. Her skin was a beautiful dark brown color" (2).** He also repeatedly describes the off-putting paleness of Tel Hesani's people. Based on these three things and a vague memory of a description of Jebel himself, I'm thinking Jebel and the rest of the Um Aineh are middle eastern, making this a fantasy book featuring POC! A rare and wonderful thing!


Book source: ARC provided by publisher via yalsa-bk.

 * Admittedly, I don't think I've ever read Huck Finn all the way through (but I've seen the movie with Elijah Wood about a million times), so my assessment of the tone of the original may be a bit off. 

 ** All quotes and page numbers are taken from an Advanced Reading Copy and do not necessarily match the published copy.

The Dead-Tossed Waves

Ryan, Carrie. The Dead-Tossed Waves. New York: Delacorte Press - Random House Children's Books, 2010. Print. The Forest of Hands and Teeth 2.

[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/8363459]

Booktalk:
Gabry always follows the rules, does what she's supposed to. She's grown-up watching her mother kill the Mudo that wash onto the beach at every high tide; she knows that the rules are there to keep her safe and she knows the consequences for breaking them. Still, she lets herself be convinced to climb the barrier to hang out under the ruins of a roller coaster with a bunch of other kids. Cira, her best friend is going and so is Catcher, Cira's big brother and the object of Gabry's secret affection. Everything starts out perfection. She even gets some alone time with Catcher, which is why she's so far from the rest of the group and able to escape back to Vista when a Breaker shows up, biting and infecting Gabry's friends.

Review:
I wasn't that big of a fan of The Forest of Hands and Teeth, and when this book, its sequel, finally came out, I decided I wasn't going to bother. But there is was, staring at me from the library shelves, and I had to grab it. TFoHaT left me with lost of questions about the Sisterhood, life after the return, and the survival of Mary and crew. And I wanted answers, dammit! The Dead-Tossed Waves held the possibility of answers and a story about the new generation of folks post-return besides. On some level it delivered, but on another, not so much.

All of my leftover questions from TFoHaT were answered, kind of, all in about 5 pages towards the end, and those answered were satisfying. Buuut those answers did not justify the rest of the book for me. There was less monotony and repetition in this book than in the last; really and truly a lot happened. Buuut it still didn't do it for me. A lot of the book was Gabry's reactions to what was going on around her, especially what went on between her and Catcher and her and new guy Elias. And, well, I didn't like being in Gabry's head. There were SO MANY TIMES that I wanted to shake her because she would read a situation as completely opposite of how I read it and/or completely opposite of what was actually going on. It helped to build tensions and intrigue the first couple of times she thought one of the boys was disregarding her or brushing her off when in actuality they were trying to profess their undying love, but when it happened EVERY TIME THEY TALKED, it got a little old.

And I have lingering questions. Again. These questions might convince me to pick up The Dark and Hollow Places when it comes out next March, but little else will.


Book source: Philly Free Library

Don't Know Where Don't Know When for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is: 


Laing, Annette. Don't Know Where Don't Know When. Statesboro, Georgia: Confusion Press, 2007. Print. Snipesville Chronicles 1.
[Book cover credit: Provided by the author. Thanks!]

Booktalk:
When Hannah and Alex are so rudely torn from their happy lives in San Francisco to move to the middle of nowhere Georgia, Hannah expects her entire life to turn into one huge snooze-fest. They're both forced to go to summer camp at Snipesville State College, where Alex manages to make a friend and Hannah manages to find a Starbucks instead of her camp. When Alex and his new friend Brandon spot Hannah ditching, they decide to join her, and they all end up heading to the library. After finding an WWII identity card in a book and having a weird encounter with a professor, all three decide to head back to the Starbucks. Only when they leave the library, they're no longer in Snipesville and Starbucks hasn't yet been invented.

Review:
I'll admit, the opening of this book was a little slow for me. All the time spent with Hannah and Alex before they go back in time (and before they even get to Georgia), didn't really do anything for me. BUT, if you stick it out through Hannah's whining about how unfair her life is (actually, this continues throughout the book), they'll meet up with Brandon and end up in WWII England where things get very cool. In WWII England, Hannah, Alex and Brandon are all evacuees for the London, sent to the English countryside to escape the Blitz (exactly like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe!). Hannah and Alex are taken in by an almost welcoming couple. Brandon, who is black, is taken back to London. Though black children were also evacuated during the bombings of London, it was much harder to find people to take them in. Also, black people weren't all that common in England during this time, so Brandon spends the entire book being kind of a novelty. Hannah and Alex are left to get used to the British countryside during the war and desperately try to find out what happened to Brandon in a society that doesn't tell unpleasant things to children. Meanwhile, Brandon runs away from the man who took him back to London and is presumed dead after a bombing.

But he's not dead; he's really in WWI England. He's even in the same town as Hannah and Alex, just 25 years earlier! Brandon manages to find friendly people (with some help) and even a job, but being black is a much rarer thing in 1915 than it was in 1940. And the attitudes toward black people weren't all that great either. In her acknowledgments, Laing states that the past is not particularly politically correct, which is true, and neither is her portrayal of it. The scenes set both in 1915 and in 1940 are rich in historical detail, including the attitudes of the people in them. While Alex seems to go along pretty fine throughout the story, Hannah is constantly bristled by the treatment of children (what she considers a beating, everyone else considers a well-deserved spanking) and Brandon is constantly affected by peoples reactions to him as a "colored" young man. Though Brandon makes it through his time traveling experience suffering from nothing more than hateful words, the black people he meets both during The Great War (WWI) and WWII do not fare as well.

I managed to get completely caught up in this book. There is a story inside a story that needs solving in order for Hannah, Alex and Brandon to make it back to 21st century Georgia, and though they don't understand how or why, it is connected to their present day lives. Also, given that he's in the same town, Brandon's experiences in 1915 England have some really close ties to the people he, Hannah and Alex meet in WWII England. There were so many ways that all of these connections and different-name-same-person instances could have been screwed up or over simplified, but Laing manages to make them all make sense and even manages to make some of them surprising. My only disappointment in this area was Peggy, and it totally wasn't Laing's fault. I simply wanted 1915 Peggy to grow up to be a different person, but not everyone can live up to their full potential (I'm still angry about who she grew up to be, but I don't want to ruin the surprise).

In short, this is a great time travel book. I wasn't so caught up in the logistics of the time traveling that I lost the ability to be caught up in the times where they ended up. It's also a great look at the day-to-day lives of some of the people left behind in England during the fighting of each world war.


Now, about the cover: If you see slightly older reviews of this book around the blogosphere, or even look this book up on amazon (librarything, goodreads, etc.) it has a different cover where the kids are not in silhouette. While I would usually be all for actual kids rather than kid-shaped shadows, especially when one of the main characters is a POC, I really don't like the old cover. It is, to be honest, why it's taken me two months to get around to reading and reviewing this book. The older cover is on the copy I received. It looks so much more like a history book than a time travel history book, and we all know there is a HUGE difference between the two. While Don't Know Where has the potential to be about kids sent to the past to learn all about it, most likely in a school-type setting, that's not what this book ends up being. But that is what the old cover portrays. I don't know why, but the new cover art for the second printing, in addition to matching the cover art on the sequel, gives it more of an adventure or fantasy feel to me. Kid-shaped shadows are a bit cartoon-y, I guess, and apparently that's what I need in order to feel like I haven't been "assigned" a book specifically to learn from it.

And, yes, I've always been a huge fan of historical fiction but hated studying history. How did you know? :)


Book source: Review copy provided by the author. Thanks Annette!

Stolen - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Velde, Vivian Vande. Stolen. Marshall Cavendish, 2008. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/5839124]

Awards:
South Carolina Junior Book Award Nominee (2010-2011)

Booktalk:

The simplest way to begin is to start at the ending: The girl's name was Isabelle.

This is the simplest way because in the beginning she had no name -- she was a girl with no name running through a forest she didn't know, for a reason she couldn't remember. She didn't know if she was running away from something or to something or for the simple joy of running

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When Isabelle is chased into a tree by a pack of dogs, she realizes she probably is running from something; she just has no idea what that something is. She's brought into the village and told that she's probably running from the old witch in the woods. A baby was just stolen by the witch, so maybe, just maybe, the witch released the girl she stole six years ago. Her name was Isabelle.
 
Review:
Let me start off by saying that this book is never as spooky as the cover would suggest. There may be an old witch, and there is certainly rampant speculation about said witch and what she might do out there all alone in the forest, but this book isn't about her. It's about Isabelle. Also, there is someone a lot more scary than a witch, but that person is scary in a much different way than what the cover advertises. This person inspires a slow build of scary rather than a jump out and grab you scary. I say this because I certainly wouldn't have picked this book up when I was in late elementary/early middle school (I was kind of a wimp), but I probably would have really loved the story inside.
 
The girl who might be Isabelle gets thrown into a lot of drama, right from the get-go. She's bitten by a hunting dog that is looking for a witch. When she begins to recover from that, she has to tell the family that took her in that she remembers nothing about her own life. Just when she starts to come to terms with that, the folks who might be her family come to claim her. The newly stolen baby was their daughter as well. Their joy at having Isabelle back is tempered by worry about the baby. There is so much pain in this family; Isabelle wants to be their missing daughter, if only to allow them to avoid the pain of losing a daughter all over again. Then Isabelle meets Honey, possibly her older sister, and she can tell that whether Isabelle is the "real" Isabelle or not, Honey wants her family to have nothing to do with her.

Isabelle has some memory; she knows how to spin wool and she knows she was never a princess, for example. She can still navigate the world she's found herself in, even if she has no idea what her place is in it. Maybe because, at least in her head, she has no history with the people around her, she sees things about them that the rest of the village may not. She feels sorry for the mother and father (hers?) who have love two daughters to the witch, but she can see, where others do not, that this desperation to have Isabelle back isn't just the grasping hope of grieving parents. She can see that the rich aunt after whom Isabelle was named is lonely and desperate to have her namesake back. She sees that Honey isn't just suspicious of her, never believing her to be the true Isabelle, but that she doesn't believe that the "real" Isabelle is capable of coming back at all. And she sees that Avis, the woman who initially took her in, doesn't trust the lot of them. These insights don't always seem to help Isabelle figure things out as quickly as she should, but they are more interesting than simple, wide-eyed wonder at that is new around her.

There's a lot of intrigue in this little village that Isabelle must decipher if she's going to figure out who she really is. When it does finally come back to her, it all comes back in a rush (I mean for her. The writing isn't rushed). The ending is unbelievably clever. I had to rush back and reread the prologue to make sure it all fits together, because it is certainly not what I was expecting. It's awesome; I highly recommend it.


Book source: Philly Free Library

The Red Pyramid - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Riordan, Rick. The Red Pyramid. New York: Disney - Hyperion Books, 2010. Print. The Kane Chronicles 1.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9277689]

Booktalk:
Carter and Sadie don't see each other often. When their mother died, their mother's parents were granted custody of Sadie, and Carter went with their father. Everywhere. Dr. Julius Kane, Sadie and Carter's father, is an Egyptologist who travels the world doing research and giving lectures. Living with him, Carter has had experiences other kids can only dream about. He's also missed out on some "normal" kid stuff, like learning that it's not cool, or even okay, to wear loafers. Sadie, on the other hand, has had her fill of normalcy and is dying (her hair at least) for a little excitement. When something goes horribly wrong during Carter and their father's annual visit with Sadie, Carter and Sadie must learn to work together and trust each other, an uncle they never knew they had, and a cat in order to save their father from Set, the Egyptian god of the desert. Oh, and the world. They have to save that too.

Review:
Rick Riordan has done it again! He's taken kids who could be normal, personality-wise if not in circumstance this time, linked them up with a deity and set them loose. This time, the kids are not children of gods, but the children of former members of a society (of magicians!) dating back to the time of the Pharaohs that is dedicated to serving/controlling the gods of Egypt. Carter and Sadie are more powerful than most because of their lineage, but there is a Harry Potter-esque it-could-be-anyone thing going on that will open up the rest of the series for a lot of interesting sidekicks. At this point in the series there are only a few kids still training in this society, one of whom is already set up as the girl Carter will embarrassingly and awkwardly crush on for probably the rest of the series, but I'm sure Riordan will bring in a whole cast of interesting kids by the end.

The whole story is told from both Sadie and Carter's points of view in, more or less, alternating chapters. I really liked getting to see the story unfold through both of their eyes. The changing point of view didn't bog down the story, really, since everything was still told in sequence with little to no instances of both characters covering the same event. I did wish, however, that their was a bit more of a difference between their voices. When they're actually talking, there is plenty of difference between proper, nerdy Carter and punky, spunky Sadie, but when they're narrating they're not all that different. Every once in a while Sadie, as narrator, gets riled up about something and it's really clear that she's the one telling the story (the name of the narrator is on every page to help with that as well), but for the most part both of them just sound like Riordan.

Something that is mentioned on multiple occasions but is far from a focal point of the story is that Sadie and Carter's father is black and their mother was white. Both of the kids are biracial, but neither of them looks it. They have that mini-me thing going on with their parents: Sadie looks astonishingly like her mother and Carter looks just like his dad. In the beginning of the book, Sadie talks about how, without her mother there, people question her relationship to Carter and their father because she's so clearly white and they so clearly aren't. She talks about how annoying it is, on the few days a year that they get to spend together, that people question whether or not she belongs in her family. This is, of course, complicated because she doesn't feel like she belongs due to the very limited amount of time they are actually on the same continent. Also near the beginning, Carter expresses his envy of Sadie's normal life with their grandparents. He feels hurt and rejected because his grandparents fought so hard for Sadie and not for him. While I was reading, I wondered about that; why did their grandparents only fight for the grandchild that looks like them? There is a magically influences reason for why they only went to court for custody of Sadie, but I didn't feel like Carter really processed that information when he found out. Maybe because he wasn't thinking about it in the same way that I was, he didn't need the cathartic breakthrough that I was looking for. It was enough, for him, to know that without magical influence his grandparents may have fought just as hard to hold on to their grandson as they did their granddaughter. This is all balanced out by Sadie's feelings of abandonment because she was left with their grandparents rather than being allowed on the road with Carter and their dad, so maybe I'm reading too much into the situation.

Family issues aside (and I'm paying more attention to them here than was paid in the book), I love that Carter and Sadie's race was a non-issue. I do wish that both of them had been presented as biracial characters, or that they even saw themselves that way, rather than one white and one black, but I'm glad that this did not pick up elements of a "problem novel" about a biracial family. It is simply a fantasy book with biracial main characters!


Book source: Philly Free Library

The Brimstone Key

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Benz, Derek and J.S. Lewis. The Brimstone Key. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010. Print. Grey Griffins: The Clockwork Chronicles 1.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9250799]

Booktalk (for folks new to the Grey Griffins):
Harley, tall and buff, is a whiz engineer, especially considering he's a sixth grader.
Natalia, whose signature long red braids are always trailing behind her, is kind of a whiz in general.
Ernie, or Agent Thunderbolt, is currently part faerie, and the more he uses the power that comes with that, the more faerie and less human he will become. But Ernie's an upbeat kid and has decided to use his powers for good, you know, like Superman.
Max, the leader of the group, is the youngest in a very rich, very powerful family. With that comes certain responsibilities. Luckily he has his friends to help him out.
Together they are the Grey Griffins, and they assist the Templar in their quest to protect the innocent from what is evil in this world.

Booktalk (for Grey Griffin fans):
Iron Bridge Academy is finally about to open, and the Grey Griffins will be attending school with Templar kids like themselves. Though they've never been around other Templar kids, except Brooke of course whose father will be headmaster, the Grey Griffins are excited. Ernie, especially, is looking forward to recruiting more changelings to his super hero team. Before they can all be whisked off to school, they're visited by a clockwork bug that leads them to an underground vault. When they find an old set of Round Table cards (and almost die, of course), things start to get weird, even by the Grey Griffins rather warped standards. One of the characters on the card, The Clockwork King, just walks away.

Review:
The Brimstone Key is a great start to what looks like it will be a promising new direction in the Grey Griffins stories. As someone who has never picked up a Grey Griffins book before, I found this story easy to understand and catch up with. I may go back and read other Grey Griffins books now, while I wait for the next book, but I won't be going back to read them because I felt I was missing something here. That said, I probably did miss some things that devoted Grey Griffin fans will squee about. There were a few characters that were clearly making cameo appearances in this book, I assume from the previous Grey Griffin escapades, but they weren't so central to this story that I minded not really knowing who they were. Of course, there also might be a bit too much information and back story in the beginning of this book for someone who has just devoured the previous Grey Griffins series. Just because I appreciated all of the explanation and introduction of characters doesn't mean that everyone else will. BUT if you are a Grey Griffins fan, or are providing readers' advisory for one, rest assured that there is a lot after those first few chapters that Max, Natalia, Ernie and Harley were surprised about, so I'm sure you (or your reader) will be too.

This book was pitched to me as a steampunk novel for middle grade readers, and I wondered just how the writers were going to pull that off with established characters from a series set in current times. They did it wonderfully and pretty realistically. Well, maybe realistically isn't the best word given that this is a fantasy novel, but the writers did not require any ridiculous suspensions of disbelief of me in order to fit the steampunk elements into the story. The Grey Griffins nemesis is a man who has spent the last century trapped in a Round Table card. When he somehow escapes, he restarts the experiments and projects that got him imprisoned in the first place. And voila! We have clockwork machines running amuck in the modern day (Templar cloaked) world. Fashions at Iron Bridge Academy also run on the steampunk-y style. At first, this was weird to me, but parts of it get explained away pretty understandably:

• The Academy is not actually in Avalon, but in Iron Bridge, a Templar community outside of the "regular" world that has maintained Victorian sensibilities.
• All the kids wear goggles because they can act out their Round Table tournaments with them.
• A lot of the changelings are depressed about their lot in life, and so bring in the sort-of goth element.
• All the grown-ups have weird weapons strapped all over them, especially when things start to get dangerous.

Put all of that together with a bunch of evil clockwork machines and a "subway" restored to its turn of the century glory and you have a good old steampunk costume party at school every day, and because the Grey Griffins are woefully dorky, fashion-wise, all of this gets explained in great detail. And while I'm a fan of the steampunk elements throughout (clearly), I don't think they are overwhelming to the story. Readers who are just looking for a fantasy or just looking for another Grey Griffins book shouldn't be put off by them.

I really enjoyed getting to know all of the Grey Griffins (and a few yet to be named sidekicks, to avoid being spoiler-y). I'm sure that fans of the previous series will enjoy heading off to school with Grey Griffins here, and new readers are sure to be sucked in as well. There is definitely a Harry Potter vibe going on with the addition of Iron Bridge Academy to these kids lives that will appeal to a lot of readers.


The Brimstone Key came out yesterday and is available for purchase!


Book source: Review copy from publisher via the yalsa-bk listserv.